Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Member in the News: Scott Swinton

Scott Swinton, Michigan State University

Should pollinating drones take over for honeybees?

By The Christian Science Monitor - February 9, 2017
Although the answer isn't a straightforward no,
it would be a challenging leap to go from this one little drone
pollinating one large flower to an army of drones spreading across
fields of crops, says Scott Swinton, an agricultural and environmental
economist at Michigan State University who was not involved in the
research.

In North America, farmers largely rely on white boxes
full of European honeybees, Apis mellifera. These domestic bees live in
dense populations with perhaps tens of thousands of worker bees in each
hive. That is an enormous amount of pollination power, Dr. Swinton
explains.

A fleet of drones to match that "would just be a very formidable cost," he says in a phone interview with the Monitor.